2019 Community Endeavour
Vision: Maximizing mutual benefit. Benefit for members, as well as for the people and causes they care about. Personal benefit, and larger purpose. See also Short Term Humanism Opportunities. Probably a values-based community. A community to achieve a good life and a good world (for members and as much of the "outside" world as possible). This means nothing is really "off topic" or beyond the scope of this kind of community. Trying to arrive at and share the best set of fundamental values, and all others built on top (besides personal preferences AKA aesthetics). Need to map "what" and "how". How to create and grow such a community? Well, I have some abstract ideas written in How to build social capital and community. Probably the most important would be to find the right people. People who like my vision, and want to seriously work towards it. So, who could be like that? * people from "More Together" slack? * people from "Rainforest" Calgary? * "The Human Venture" type people? * meetups: Calgary Cohousing Meetup, "The Community YYC"? * nonprofit sector, people working on the upcoming elections? * I'd say some groups, but they can be shockingly bad places for connection. And then what? Just...talk to them about these ideas...hopefully have some specifics about what can be done...? Rainforest Calgary has been extremely successful at getting new people every week...how did they start? From there, they probably just asked visitors each time to recruit more. So, probably just find the right people, ask them to recruit more, and ask those recruits to recruit more, and so on? What I think I think some things are a good idea, for various reasons: * to get what we want, we need a network big, strong, and "full" enough to get/make/accomplish it. * mutual benefit, providing value to each other, is essential to accomplishment and network building itself * a network is best made so that any hierarchy emerges "naturally", not institutionally, rigidly, or arbitrarily. * a group is not necessarily a network. * constant innovation and selection is needed to avoid stagnation and decay * nothing is beyond the scope of the ideal network, though specializations are best served with their own sub-network (probably not a separate one, however) * market, marketing, labor, management, ownership, etc. perhaps all of these should be the same network * something being part of a network is not enough, it probably needs multiple strong connections, as well as many many weak connections, and significant value needs to flow over them Getting to specifics What is it? An Organization (as defined by Holacracy, for example?)? Network of alignments? Probably both, overlapping. Long-term goal-oriented, building the capital (resources, skill, connections) needed to accomplish stuff. How do outsiders become part? Is it like a club membership, paid monthly or whatever? Is it just like friendship? * Some more like alliances (alignment actually) and cross-promotion * club membership type stuff at some point maybe. Unless decentralized Patreon type stuff works, could be better Mall-like: many different "vendors", (and food!). But instead of mostly offering products to buy, this mall-like thing has philosophy, community projects, leisure... What roles for people? If I'm "pitching" this to someone, they want to know what their role is. * (social-capital) entrepreneur types, creators, initiators * hired people * volunteers * "consumers", "students" Some ideas for what people want and what people can provide each other: What a community should do and List of Social Activities. We need "vendors" or "entrepreneurs" for each of those areas, and probably more. Realizing why science makes intellectual progress (more depth and breadth, more agreement) and using that on facts, values, means-ends chains, etc. What will I do to get this going? For alignments: Share a blueprint about how to do this alignment stuff on your own. (hopefully eventually have a website to assist). Have compelling reasons to do things, and a clear idea of what things to do (reason chains?). Ways I can directly provide value to people: Teach thinking skills, philosophy. Do some volunteer tasks. Distinguishing this from redundancy Is this all like stuff we have already? Civilization, market? Just on the degree of trust or "social capital", having a civilization doesn't mean that the levels of social capital are high, or widely distributed. And markets are designed to operate even when there is minimal social capital. Community, on the other hand, is the place where valuable social capital can be built and used. See also Why We Should Build Social Capital. Maximization of Marketing (better than traditional marketing) It turns out, even many capitalists have realized that the best form of marketing is a community. And, conversely, a lot of community-minded people need to see the serious work that marketers and such have done on the subject, and that work is probably credible if it has been improving their marketing.